Launch Effectiveness

(Recommended Pre-requisite) Below assumes we know what the options are for Launch Effectiveness. Now for my personal preference.

Why Not “Going with gut”? I love simplicity. However, simple is never the goal… effective is. IMO it is efficient but ineffective to rely exclusively on the opinion of a few (the HIPPO, highest paid person’s opinion). It is too conducive to politics, optics, and not embracing the beauty of learning and iteration.

Why Not “North Star”? North Star is good, but it ignores the checks and balances needed to truly understand if we’ve delivered value. “Yes, we did accomplish this one thing, but this other thing is hurting more now”.

Constellation Metrics help us on our journey towards delivering results that truly matter, are sustainable, and we can only do that consistently if we have the humility to seek to increase our awareness of the reality of our assumptions. Which is why Constellation Metrics are my favorite way to express Launch Effectiveness.

HOWEVER… If you don’t state any assumptions or hypotheses before you launch… please stop reading and go state your assumptions and a hypothesis, even if you don’t measure it. Everyone knowing what we are aiming for is vital, in its absence the happiness of a few becomes the goal.

HOWEVER… If you’ve stated a hypothesis that is not easily understandable… please stop reading and go state a single north star for the launch. Measuring one thing really well, is better than subjective opinion, which is better than being a HIPPO feature factory.

HOWEVER… If you’ve stated assumptions, expressed hypotheses, and have used a north star measure… but now you have multiple assumptions you’d like to pay attention to, then use Constellation Metrics. Constellation Metrics are broken into thee categories: Adoption, First-order, and Second-order measures. More on that in this note about the types of Constellation Metrics.

Note: This was the ℹ[Min, Mid, Max] and ℹ[Why => What => Me] variant of the concept of launch effectiveness. If the other variants are created, I’ll update this with links to them.